How does the Spirit of God move upon his people to give of their resources to build buildings and fund schools and do all manner of interior decorating?

Apparently the answer is “first He draws an org chart.”

Linked here for your perusals are two PDF documents (Pages 1-10) (Pages 11-20) that show how Lancaster Baptist Church (and by extension West Coast Baptist College) does its fundraising. As corporate organization schemes go, it’s a thing of beauty.

It appears that they actually start planning in October for the big giving event in March and involve the entire church with video teams sent out, personal testimonies, targeted preaching, mailings, and endless promotions of the giving drive at other events between October and March.

Then after all those months of planning and work God miraculously sends in money. I mean it may look an awful lot like church members being coaxed, cajoled, and and all but coerced into giving but I’m sure God is involved somehow.

It seems to be a week for West Coast Baptist College around here. Before I get into the new story, however, it’s necessary to give some background…

Way back in the day, Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status because it refused to change its policy on interracial (whatever that means) dating. A lot of other fundamentalist institutions beheld this debacle from afar off and were severely torn between the love of two different kinds of money: 1) money in tax savings and 2) money from the racist parents of students at their schools who didn’t want their little girl dating one of “those people.”

So somebody came up with a VERY CLEVER compromise called the “parental consent” rule which said that any dating relationship on campus has to have parental permission. This kicked responsibility up the road a bit so that the administration could claim “We’re not racists — we just follow the wishes of racists parents who pay us money!”

This is all rather strange because in no other area does the administration of a fundy college allow the whims of parents to set its policy. In fact, when I was at a very similar Fundy U I was told that my parents calling and complaining about the rules or asking for exceptions to policy would be seen as rebellion by ME and that I was to ask my parents not to call.

With that in mind, here’s a West Coast Baptist College memo from 2001 (PDF) in which Paul Chappell attempts to quash feelings of unease in his staff about a dating policy that is put in place specifically to cater to racism. The page numbers in the pages that follow indicate that the material is from some kind of official handbook.

There is a fully symphony of dog whistles here with references to words like “compatible”, “unequally yoked”, and “exotic relationship.” We’ve seen this kind of thing before and it stinks to high heaven.